Use Cases and Advantages of Chat Bots for Enterprises

Chat bots and integrations are a very important topic for digitization and enterprise productivity in the mobile age. Chat bots help to speed up work processes, simplify the exchange of information and automate processes. Today, we discuss which concepts are possible for chat bots and which use cases and advantages result for enterprises.

Chat bots can generally be used for numerous systems. Teamwire allows to integrate chat bots for any 3rd party software and services. Some examples of systems that can be connected with chat bots are:

Basically, there are two main concepts for chat bots which result in different use cases:

1. Information and Research

An employee or customer wants information on a particular topic. The user contacts the chat bot and asks a question, which she simply sends as a message to the chat bot. The chat bot then sends back the desired information as a reply.

For example, if a user wants to know the stock price of "BMW," she could send the message "BMW" to a stock market bot, whereupon the stock market bot returns the current price of the BMW stock as a message. Or if a customer wants to find out about offers for a product or service, a chat bot could send the customer "current offers." Similarly, an employee could contact a chat bot to get information on the current "inventory" of the warehouse or the availability of a particular product.

Depending on the design of the chat bot, employees and customers could also ask complete questions to the chat bot, such as "in which color is the product available?", "what is the status of production plant 3?", "what flights are available to London on Monday?" or "how much revenue did we make last week?". It is of course possible to make countless examples like this.

Through a combination of checklists and selection options, chat bots can also serve as an interactive advisor. For example, chat bots can guide customers through purchase processes, support users to find a solution for an issue, help employees to plan their travel, or assist customer service staff with product maintenance checklists.

2. Reports, News and Alerts

Chat bots can automatically send reports and news to employees and customers. For example, a chat bot can send the sales team an up-to-date report from the CRM system about new accounts and closed deals every week. Similar reports via chat bots to selected employees are, of course, also possible for ERP or accounting systems.

Another use case for reports by chat bots would be the daily delivery of the meal plan from the canteen, or an automatic message with the weather forecast before going on a business trip.

Automated reports are also very good for news. For example, if news about a company or specific topic are found, a news bot could automatically send links to those articles to interested employees. In a likely manner, if there are new posts or updates on the intranet, all employees could be automatically notified by an intranet bot. Similar use cases for news are also conceivable for any social media channel and all websites.

An important use case of automated information through chat bots are alerts. In the case of an urgent support request, an employee could be informed immediately by a chat bot about the new ticket. In the event of a malfunction of a manufacturing plant or an IT system, a chat bot could immediately send an alert to the responsible employees.

Reports can also be combined with approval processes. For example, once an employee has made her travel expense bill, this report could be automatically sent to the responsible manager for approval. The manager can then approve the travel expenses directly via the chat bot with a simple "Ok" command.

Advantages of Chat Bots for Employees:

- Employees can use the chat bot to retrieve information directly in Teamwire at any time and from anywhere. This is often easier and faster than switching to other apps and services.- Often chat bots help to relieve other employees, who would otherwise have to provide the information manually. As a result resources can be saved or used better.- The information and reports provided by chat bots are kept in Teamwire for later reading/finding.- The information and reports from chat bots can be easily and directly forwarded to other employees in Teamwire.

Benefits of Chat Bots for Enterprises:

- The development costs of a chat bot are significantly lower compared to an individual app.- An easy technical realization is possible with the API and associated SDK of Teamwire.- The enterprise has full access control, which employees are allowed to use a chat bot and access confidential data.- Integrating a chat bot into Teamwire ensures high security, strong privacy and full compliance.- In addition, logging of information retrieval and chat bot activity is possible (e.g. by archiving the messages).

If you want to know more about Teamwire and would like to understand, how your enterprise could benefit from chat bots, please contact us.